


Paradeisos

by Enneara



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Catholic Guilt, Courtly Love, Drawing, First Time, M/M, Mutual Pining, Sexual Tension, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:08:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25464466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enneara/pseuds/Enneara
Summary: ‘Yusuf takes hold of the sword by the blade and drives it further into his body, using the movement to pull Nicolò closer. His dark eyes flash as his bloody hand cups the back of Nicolò’s head and draws him in for a kiss.’Traveling through Greece with Yusuf after fleeing the Holy Land, Nicolò suffers a crisis of faith.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 60
Kudos: 1229





	Paradeisos

**Author's Note:**

> So like everyone else, The Old Guard dragged me kicking and screaming back to fanfic. Sword in the bed trope from Tristan and Isolde, via its delightful appearance in [mytimehaspassed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mytimehaspassed/pseuds/mytimehaspassed)’s gorgeous [Fever of Light](/works/25310596).

They stay that night in a taverna in a no-name village in the Peloponnese, nothing but a clutch of olive trees and goats clinging to a scrubby, bare-rock hill. To Nicolò, used to the extravagant green of the hills around Genova, this land is a familiar ghost, a burned and naked corpse of the Mediterranean he knows. He thinks of the siege of Jerusalem, the red-and-gold of the bodies in the sun, and the sickness inside him rises until it spreads all the way through him, a stain he will never outrun.

The innkeeper looks askance at Yusuf until he asks after his health in Greek. The distrust this man encounters everywhere in Christendom: after only six months of traveling with him, Nicolò is already weary of it. But Yusuf smiles, hiding an anger Nicolò is coming to know, blazing and unpredictable as his flashes of joy.

They eat, a simple meal of goat stew with salty cheese and sour wine. Nicolò throws crumbs to the sparrows, taking a quiet pleasure in their hopping movements, their eager acceptance of this unexpected gift. Yusuf watches him, laughing.

Nicolò looks up with a smile. ‘What?’

They talk, in the only way they can: a Babel of Yusuf’s mercantile vulgar Latin that becomes more Genovese-inflected each day, sprinkled with the few words of Maghrebi Arabic that Nicolò has so far managed to pick up. It is hard to get a full picture of the man he is traveling with, obscured as he is by the dusty window of their imperfect communication. But flashes of him come through: a biting wit, a deep seriousness, a philosopher’s consideration of the nature of things. 

Nicolò asks him, as he does every day, to teach him a little more of his language. ‘What is this?’ he asks, pointing at the goats, the olive trees, the sparrows. When Yusuf answers, Nicolò repeats the words until he gets them right, the tongue of the infidel strange and heavy in his mouth.

‘What is this?’ Yusuf asks in reply, gesturing between the two of them where they sit on the hillside, two hand-spans and an impossibility between them.

Nicolò watches the other man lick olive oil off his fingers, something inscrutable in his dark eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ he says, without understanding.

*

There is one room, at the top of a stair that twists upward like a broken back; one bed, a straw mattress on the floor, barely wide enough for two. Yusuf, exhausted, unbuckles his sword and hangs it on the nail on the back of the door before crawling to the far side of the mattress and falling asleep facing the wall. Nicolò lies down on his back, hands folded across his chest. He imagines himself as a sculpture on a tomb, the Christian martyr he should have been, if Heaven had not spat him out like tainted meat. He closes his eyes, miming a mockery of peace until he falls into a fitful sleep.

In his dream, he is trying to kill Yusuf again.

The man cannot be immortal. He just has to find his weakness, the place he can be hurt, and light will triumph, and the mission he was called here for will make sense once more. God would not test him by sending him an unkillable enemy.

In the dream, they have been fighting for hours. Yusuf is shirtless, his chest hair matted with blood running down from a hundred wounds. His breath gasps in and out, and Nicolò feels a stab of traitorous compassion. He needs to end this. Seeing an opening, he pulls his sword back and slides it between Yusuf’s ribs. _This time_ , he thinks: this time he will fall and not rise again, and Nicolò will finally be allowed to die in peace. But Yusuf keeps breathing. They both keep breathing, even as Nicolò feels the cold kiss of the scimitar in his side. He plunges his sword in again, and again, and Yusuf just laughs. Not an unkind laugh: the same way he laughed when he saw Nicolò feeding the sparrows. He takes hold of the sword by the blade and drives it further into his body, using the movement to pull Nicolò closer. His dark eyes flash as his bloody hand cups the back of Nicolò’s head and draws him in for a kiss.

The taste of him, olives and honey and blood. His breath, hot and alive. Nicolò’s mouth falls open, greed and lust possessing him, driving out every other thought. No God, no destiny, no mortality: only him, only Yusuf, their bodies entwined, their blades still buried in each other, seeking now a different kind of death.

He wakes on the straw mattress in the dusty room, drenched in arousal and self-loathing. He gets to his feet in the pallid moonlight and stumbles to the window, staring out at the grey barren of his personal Hell. He would rather dream of anything than this: Jerusalem, the bodies lying in the dust; the dream of the two warrior women, in all its confusion and urgency. Is this a test, or a trap designed to send him further into perdition? How has he wronged his God, that He would seek to damn him twice over?

He unsheathes his sword and kneels before the straight silver cross of it, resting his head against the cold metal. Before he lies down again next to Yusuf, he lays the blade naked between them on the bed: a sign that he will fight this, that he will not surrender.

When Yusuf wakes and sees the sword, he starts upright, sliding back against the wall. ‘Ancora?’ he says, wide-eyed, staring at Nicolò. _Again_?

Nicolò smiles despite himself. ‘No, no,’ he says, holding up his open hands. How can he explain without admitting the desire that shames him, that dishonors them both? ‘Protection,’ he says. He doesn’t say: _from myself_.

*

On the road that day, they come upon a girl and an old man being waylaid by bandits. The old man’s head is bloodied; the girl tries to fend off the pair of bravoes with the old man’s stick, but she is hopelessly outmatched.

Without even looking at each other, Nicolò and Yusuf draw their swords. Yusuf goes in with his scimitar, all curved slashes and fluid motions. One bandit falls to his blade before Nicolò even reaches his side.

It is not the first time they have fought together. Each time, they are more in tune, more aware of each other. But their synchrony is not perfect. As the second bandit lunges, Nicolò misjudges, thinking Yusuf will go left when he means to go right. The bandit slips past his guard and slices Yusuf cleanly across the jugular.

Nicolò watches the blood waterfall from his companion’s throat, watches the desperation in his eyes as he falls. Before his knees hit the ground, Nicolò has impaled the bandit on the point of his sword. Shaking, he bends to clean his blade on the rough black cloth of his enemy’s clothes.

The girl is weeping. When Nicolò turns, the old man drops to his knees and clutches at his tunic, murmuring softly.

Gently, Nicolò pushes him away. ‘There is a taverna, not far that way,’ he says, pointing back along the road. ‘You will be safe there.’ A promise he can’t truthfully make. Perhaps it is a blessing that they don’t understand. He gestures at them uselessly, wishing he had been the one to die. Yusuf should be here to talk to these people, not lying on the ground with his eyes staring and his throat cut.

The old man won’t let him go. The girl comes too, bending her head to kiss his hand, wringing her hands in Yusuf’s direction. He is not sure what they are saying. He catches a word that sounds like _paradiso_ , and understands: they are commending Yusuf to Heaven. _Fools_ , he thinks, in a moment of uncharacteristic bitterness. _Heaven wants none of him, and none of me either_.

‘Efcharisto, efcharisto,' he thanks them again and again, pushing their hands away, trying to extricate himself from their well-meaning grief. They must think him callous, inhuman. But he has to get Yusuf out of here before he awakes. ‘I must bury my friend,’ he says, with no hope that they will understand. He is surprised by the shudder of grief that moves through him at the words. That, at least, has an effect: they back away, averting their eyes as he lifts Yusuf’s body and props his head on his shoulder. When he turns his head, the girl and the old man are watching.

‘Leave,’ he says through gritted teeth as he walks away from them, his arms wet with Yusuf’s blood. Any moment now, he will stir, gasp, give away their terrible secret. But he stays still, corpse-heavy in Nicolò’s arms. With every step, the weight on his heart doubles. For an insane moment, he can’t remember if anyone has ever killed Yusuf but him. What if their strange curse only applies to each other? What if Yusuf is gone forever now, and he has to bear this fate alone?

Then: _of course_ , he thinks with a rush of relief — the thief on the docks in Piraeus, who thrust the knife through Yusuf’s eye before Nicolò could get to him — and at the same moment, he feels the life come back to the body in his arms, in a shudder that moves through Nicolò like the beating of his own heart.

He holds Yusuf close. ‘Stay still,’ he whispers into his ear. ’They are watching.’

Yusuf doesn’t reply. But Nicolò feels him relax, breath warm on his neck, hand draped loosely across his shoulder. There is a strange intimacy in carrying him like this, one he cannot bring himself to distrust. He crouches and lays Yusuf gently down in a dip a little way from the road.

He turns, shading his eyes. The girl and the old man are walking on, two black figures against the heart-blue sky.

Yusuf smiles, sliding one hand behind his head, arching his back like a statue to some obscene pagan virtue. ’Aren’t you going to bury me?’ he asks in a low voice, looking up at Nicolò through half-closed eyes.

Nicolò feels like laughing, and like something else, _their bodies melting together under the hot sun, his tongue in Yusuf’s ear, the taste of salt as he licks his way down his neck, making him gasp and shudder._

He shakes his head. ‘Not this time.’ He offers his hand to help him up. As he rises, Yusuf pulls him briefly close, squeezing his arm before they continue on.

*

They don’t go back to the road. The girl and the old man will talk: within a day, the tale of the heroic foreigner and his dead Saracen comrade will be in every traveler’s ear. For said Saracen comrade to be seen walking alive in the daylight would be inconvenient, to say the least. Instead, they withdraw into the wild, walking the bare hills until they find a wooded valley. Beyond the shade of the trees lies a lake, wide and still and beautiful, reflecting the lapis blue of the late afternoon sky. The sight of it catches Nicolò in the heart. He stands transfixed as Yusuf whoops and runs into the water, pulling his sweaty, blood-stained tunic over his head. As he emerges from the lake and hangs his clothes to dry in the sun, Nicolò averts his eyes.

‘I’m going to fetch wood for a fire,’ he calls, without waiting for a reply, and walks away into the cool sanctuary of the woods.

When he returns, he finds Yusuf by the shore, a blanket gathered loosely around his hips, drawing in the leather-bound sketchbook he carries everywhere. Nicolò builds the fire, glancing now and then at his companion: the careful flick of the charcoal in his hand, the way he uses his thumb to add shade and texture, how his tongue goes unconsciously to the corner of his mouth.

Eventually, Yusuf senses him watching. He stops drawing and looks up, meeting Nicolò’s eyes with an inscrutable smile. He leaves the book on a stone by the fire as he goes to get dressed.

It feels like an invitation. Nicolò leafs through the pages in the firelight, marveling at Yusuf’s skill. The women they dream of, dark-haired and terrible, laughing as they cut their way through hordes of enemies. The landscapes they have travelled: the mosaics of Byzantium, the Acropolis of Athens against an evening sky. But Nicolò is surprised to find that most of the sketches are of him. His face in half-shadow, wearing a serene look he no longer recognizes as his own; practicing his sword forms, his muscles delineated by the morning light; a sketch of him sleeping, the furrow between his brows rendered with an attention both obscene and sacred. He can barely look: it feels like a violation, as if he is touching Yusuf’s soul. A realization hot as fire burns through him. The most terrible thing of all is how it makes his heart bloom, wild and eager.

‘The sword. I know why.’

Nicolò looks up with a start. Yusuf stands looking down at him, fire reflected in his eyes. ‘I would never ask from you anything you did not want.’

Nicolò’s tongue sticks in his mouth. No language can hold his shame. ‘I do want,’ he says, and the words burn as he speaks them. ‘But what I want is a sin.’ He looks up at Yusuf, desperate. ‘Does your God not tell you it is wrong, for a man to lie with another man?’

Yusuf looks out at the lake, a wry sadness in his eyes. ‘Men have told me this, yes. God? God has never spoken to me of such a thing.’

Nicolò cannot understand how Yusuf never talks of their Gods as though they are different, even as fifty thousand bodies inside the walls of Jerusalem mutely scream otherwise. ‘I am weak,’ he says, broken. ‘God has tested me again and again, and always I have failed.’

Yusuf laughs at him, a cruel edge in it even as his voice is gentle. ‘Why do you have compassion for the birds, for every traveler on the road, and none for yourself?’ He kneels beside Nicolò in the firelight, the last of the sun haloing him in dark red. ‘God made your beauty,’ he says, and as he looks at Nicolò his eyes are filled not with shame but with a dark wonder. ‘God made my desire for you, and yours for me. Are you saying God made a mistake?’

‘You could justify anything that way,’ Nicolò argues, finding his voice. ‘You could say, God made the siege of Jerusalem. God willed what happened there.’ And that is the root of everything, he thinks: the way he shattered when he saw what his brothers had wrought, the charnel-house where his holy mission had led him.

Yusuf stands. Nicolò sees the dark flash of his anger cross his face like lightning. ‘No. God did not do that. Men did, in God’s name.’

‘How do you know the difference?’ Nicolò asks him in despair.

‘I don’t know. I feel.’ Yusuf hits himself in the chest as if the force of his fury could stop his own heart. ‘Take Jerusalem out of your mouth. Do not say what we are, what I want, is like that. Your brothers’ sins are not your own. And what you think is your sin is your nature. It is holy. Do not disrespect God by denying it.’ He grabs the bow from beside the fire and walks away into the darkening woods.

Nicolò drops his head into his hands. For a time, he is consumed by shuddering sobs, a sick man waiting for a fever to pass.

Later, he sits by the lake and watches the stars come out, two by two, each reflected in the heavens and in the dark water. He thinks about the immensity of the universe, and about the sparrows, and about the girl and the old man who live, now, because of him and Yusuf: because of what they did, and who they are.

Perhaps it isn’t that God doesn’t want them in Heaven. Perhaps it’s that He needs them here.

When Yusuf returns, he is covered in blood. Nicolò starts to his feet before he sees the deer slung across his shoulders. Yusuf hangs the corpse in a tree before he strips and walks into the lake. This time, Nicolò doesn’t look away. He watches the other man duck his head under the water and rise, water dripping from his dark curls.

Nicolò undresses, trembling, and wades naked into the cool water. He feels it greet him, know him: God’s hands, washing him clean. Yusuf stands shuddering, facing away where the reflection of the moon makes an uncertain silver road across the water. ‘The world does not deserve us,’ he says, a deep fury under his words.

Nicolò wades closer to him. Yusuf starts like a frightened animal, turning to him in surprise.

‘No,’ Nicolò says, bringing his hand up to Yusuf’s face. ‘But it needs us. Whether it deserves us or not.’

They know each other for the first time in the firelight: careful and desperate, filled with a desire so bright it hurts them to look it in the face. As Yusuf gasps in his ear, as they touch each other with burning hands, Nicolò imagines their lives stretching ahead of them — hundreds of years of this, this, _this_ — and for the first time it doesn’t seem like a curse, but like a terrible, gleaming paradise. To know this man better and better with the endless years; to walk the world together until God sees fit to bring them home.


End file.
